“Let’s
be friends,” said Katherine when she met Ida Baker at Queen’s college in 1903. Twenty years
later just weeks before her death, it was: “If you'd like me for a friend as from this Xmas I'd like to be your friend. But not
too awfully serious ma chère.”

Cooped up in foreign
guest-houses and villas, Katherine flew into rages: “Meal
times and walk times are quite enough to exasperate me and lash me into fury
beyond measure. ‘Katie mine, who is Wordsworth? Must I like him? It’s no good
looking cross because I love you, my angel, from the little tip of that cross
eyebrow to the all of you. When am I going to brush your hair again?’ I shut my
teeth and
say ‘Never!’ but I really do feel that if she
could she’d EAT me… It is impossible to describe to you my curious hatred and
antagonism to her – gross, trivial, dead to all that is alive for me, ignorant
and false.”

Ida needed to be needed. But
that was not the whole story. Katherine later wrote: “I am
simply unworthy of friendship, as I am. I take advantage of you -
demand perfection of you - crush you - And the devil of it is that even though
that is true as I write it I want to laugh.”